"What it must look and smell like when a movie brain vomits. Truly worthless."
-Variety

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Auteur Watch - Oxide and Danny Pang

How about some real chemical brothers? It's right there in the name, for Gawd's zake! And on top of that, like the Hughes, they're twins. This phenom seems to be more common than not. But at least these twins were born on the same day... same year, anyway. Somewhere on the web it says that Marc and Lori Singer are twins, but check this out... Marc "Beastmaster" Singer, born 1948. Lori Singer, born 1957. Sigh. She's almost at the grandmother stage of her career, for Gawd's zake! I was going to say that you never see Marc Singer and Kevin Bacon together, but these days it's more like Marc Singer and Ellen Degeneres. Could somebody else play the Kevin Bacon game for me? Why don't they have that on IMDb yet? Start with Eagle Eye. That'll save you a lot of heartache trying to connect the dots. But let's try and get back to the Pangs here. For Gawd's sake. They began their cinematic odyssey in 1999 in earnest with a li'l independent feature called Who Is Running? From this plot description, it seems we can tell where their whole career's basically headed, into quasi-Ringu territory. Sorry, but I must confess I'm not a Pang brother expert. Next came Bangkok Dangerous, which they would of course later remake with Nic Cage. Well, they must be making money, because they keep working. Their output is pretty impressive, you must admit! Almost as prolific as Tyler Perry! Well, Tyler's probably the gold standard now: two movies a year. He's the gold standard now. The Pangs tried to keep up during the 2000s. And despite what you might think, Bangkok Haunted's not a sequel to Bangkok Dangerous. Also, they skipped The Eye 3-9 and jumped right to The Eye 10. They did so well in fact that in 2003 they went British Hollywood with The Tesseract starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Soon after they went Hollywood with 2007's The Messengers starring Dylan McDermott. On the other hand, they didn't write one. It's a film about the ghosts that haunt Penelope Ann Miller's career. Then came their Bangkok Dangerous reboot with Nicolas Cage. I remember it well because it opened at #1 in its first week, then dropped to #8 its second week, and then completely out of the top 10 the third week... is that a good thing? Well, it doesn't seem to have slowed them down a whole lot. Their latest is Sleepwalker... which is where I have to draw the line. There's only one Sleepwalker, and that's 1992's Sleepwalkers, based on a Richard Bachman story... or Stephen King, one of those two. Check out this photo: this should tell you all you need to know... about something.